Minister of the Environment and Minister of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Goshi Hosono called representatives from 43 Prefectures to the Ministry of the Environment and requested again that they accept disaster debris from Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures.

Processing the disaster debris from the March 11 earthquake/tsunami has been a big problem. The Ministry of the Environment held a conference attended by the municipalities from all over Japan, and requested that they accept the disaster debris.

The conference was set up by the Ministry of the Environment to expedite the acceptance of disaster debris in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures. People in charge of waste disposal and cleaning in 43 prefectures and 74 municipalities participated.

It is considered that the March 11 disaster resulted in about 23 million tonnes of debris. However, there are many people voicing concern for radiation contamination, and the acceptance of the disaster debris is not happening except for Yamagata Prefecture which has already been accepting the debris and Tokyo which will start accepting starting the second half of October.

The Ministry of the Environment will ask the municipalities once again about their intentions and waste processing capacities, and will coordinate between the disaster-affected areas and the municipalities that will accept the debris.

As for the Tokyo Metropolitan government, it signed the agreement with Iwate Prefecture on September 30 with hardly any consultation with the Metropolitan Assembly and zero consultation with the residents to accept about 500,000 tonnes of disaster debris. The government says it tested the ashes of the disaster debris from Miyako City in Iwate Prefecture and it was only 133 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium.

What the Metropolitan government didn’t bother to tell anyone was that the radioactive debris were mixed with non-radioactive regular garbage and burned. The radioactive debris were supposedly 30%. However, the Ministry of the Environment itself did the testing of the disaster debris ashes in the same city back in July, and the Ministry’s number was 4895 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium. (Information from Tokyo Shinbun on 10/5/2011, in Japanese)

That leads me to suspect that Tokyo cherry-picked the cleanest possible debris to justify their decision. Why Governor Shintaro Ishihara is so eager to add radiation to his already irradiated Tokyo is a mystery to me, except there’s a saying in Japan – “If you eat poison, lick the plate, too.”

… these are not “dosimeters” but “glass badges” that passively collect radiation information. It won’t help these children or their parents to avoid high-radiation areas and spots, it won’t tell them how much radiation they will have been exposed unless they are sent in to a company to interpret the data.

Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.

Yo: So making comparisons with X-rays and CT scans has no meaning. Because you can breathe in radioactive material.

Hirose: That’s right. When it enters your body, there’s no telling where it will go. The biggest danger is women, especially pregnant women, and little children. Now they’re talking about iodine and cesium, but that’s only part of it, they’re not using the proper detection instruments. What they call monitoring means only measuring the amount of radiation in the air. Their instruments don’t eat. What they measure has no connection with the amount of radioactive material.

Dr. Helen Caldicott (Co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility):

You’ve bought the propaganda from the nuclear industry. They say it’s low-level radiation. That’s absolute rubbish. If you inhale a millionth of a gram of plutonium, the surrounding cells receive a very, very high dose. Most die within that area, because it’s an alpha emitter. The cells on the periphery remain viable. They mutate, and the regulatory genes are damaged. Years later, that person develops cancer. Now, that’s true for radioactive iodine, that goes to the thyroid; cesium-137, that goes to the brain and muscles; strontium-90 goes to bone, causing bone cancer and leukemia. It’s imperative … that you understand internal emitters and radiation, and it’s not low level to the cells that are exposed. Radiobiology is imperative to understand these days.”